Food & Society in Global Cities

Culinary practices are intricate to how urban spaces are experienced in everyday life. This course explores the nuanced ways food practices transform global cities worldwide. It investigates how personal preferences of food shape social, cultural, and spatial boundaries. Throughout the course, students will analyze urban spaces in global cities from an intersectionality theory of capitalism lens to consider how power structures shape culinary practices in terms of race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, class, ethnicity, language, religion, caste, ability, and diet. For instance, immigrant cooking and eating practices help define ethnic enclaves. And gourmet food trucks for the middle-class can become tropes for spurring gentrification. Analyzing global North and South cities, course themes focus on the politics of street food, food trucks, restaurants, markets, farmers’ markets, food deserts, food assistance programs, urban farming and agriculture, gastronomic gentrification, and food delivery services. This course comprises a mixture of active teaching strategies, short lectures, a film, and several field trips throughout New York City. By the end of the course, students will garner a deep understanding of how food and societies influence, and are shaped by, contemporary global cities.